These terms are the agreement between you and the company behind Lineage & Heritage. They cover what we sell, what we promise, what we do not promise, and what happens if something goes wrong. Placing an order means you accept them.
Please read section 6 in particular. It explains what a coat of arms actually is, and it is the section most likely to differ from what you expect.
Who you are contracting with
Who you are dealing with
- Legal entity: Fufos LLC
- Form: a limited liability company organized under the laws of the State of Wyoming, United States
- Trading name: Lineage & Heritage
- Contact: support@lineageandheritage.com
Lineage & Heritage is a trading name of Fufos LLC. There is no physical storefront; we operate entirely online, and email is the channel we answer. Our registered office is on file with the Wyoming Secretary of State, and we will provide the address on request.
What we sell
We sell personalized digital books about family names and heraldry, delivered as PDF files by email. Depending on the tier you choose, a book may include a history of the surname, its documented origins and migrations, an account of the armorial record associated with it, and an illustrated plate of the arms with the meaning of each element explained.
Everything we sell is digital. Nothing is shipped, there is nothing to return, and there are no delivery charges.
Who can buy
You must be at least 18 years old and able to enter into a binding contract. By ordering you confirm that you are, and that the payment method you use is yours or that you are authorized to use it.
Orders, prices and payment
All prices are shown in U.S. dollars. Payment is taken in full at the time of the order and processed by Stripe.
We sell to customers in the United States. Where sales tax applies to a digital product in your state, it is calculated and shown before you pay.
An order is a request until we accept it. We may decline or cancel an order and refund the payment in full if we cannot research the name, if the request looks fraudulent, or if the order was placed at a price that was obviously wrong. If we cancel before production, you are charged nothing.
Delivery
Your book is delivered by email to the address you enter at checkout, as a download link.
We prepare and deliver your book without undue delay and in any case within 3 business days of your order. Most orders are ready sooner than that; the figure is a commitment, not an estimate.
If it has not arrived, check your spam folder first, then write to support@lineageandheritage.com and we will resend it. Delivery depends on the email address you gave us being correct and able to receive mail. If it is wrong, tell us and we will send it again to the right one at no charge.
Heraldic and genealogical accuracy
What a coat of arms is, and what this book is not.
In the English and continental European traditions, arms are granted to an individual and descend to that person’s descendants. They are not granted to surnames. There is no coat of arms that belongs to everyone who shares a family name, and there never was.
What we research and reproduce is the armorial record historically associated with a surname — arms borne by documented individuals or families who carried that name. Buying this book does not establish that you descend from those armigers, and it does not give you the right to bear their arms.
Where the surviving record preserves a regional or family pattern rather than a specific grant, we say so plainly inside the book and compose the achievement in the correct grammar of heraldry. We never present a composed achievement as an antique grant.
We do not guarantee the historical or genealogical accuracy of any surname origin, migration account, armorial attribution or family narrative in our books. They are works of research and interpretation drawn from published records, and published records disagree with each other. Where the evidence is thin or contested, the book says so rather than inventing certainty.
Nothing we produce is a substitute for professional genealogical certification, a DNA test, or registration with a heraldic authority. Our books carry no standing before any government, court, church, registry, insurer, club, or heraldic body, and they confer no title, nobility, lineage or legal status of any kind.
Corrections
If your book has an error — a wrong detail, a misspelling, a name we clearly got wrong — tell us within 30 days of delivery and we will correct it and send you a new copy at no charge. We will keep working on it until the error is fixed.
This covers mistakes. It does not cover a disagreement with what the historical record says, and it is not a route to a refund. Our Refund Policy sets out how refunds work.
Refunds
Because every book is researched and produced for a specific name at the moment you order it, we do not issue monetary refunds, except in the narrow cases set out in our Refund Policy — which you should read before ordering, because it forms part of these terms.
Intellectual property and your licence
The text, research, layout, typography, illustrations and armorial artwork in our books, and everything on this website, are owned by Fufos LLC or licensed to it, and are protected by copyright and other laws.
What you get
When you buy a book you receive a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, perpetual licence to use it for your own private and family purposes. Specifically, you may:
- read it, keep it, and store your own backup copies;
- print it for yourself, and have it printed and bound for yourself;
- print copies for members of your own family, as a gift;
- show it to whoever you like, and quote short passages with credit to Lineage & Heritage.
What you do not get
You do not acquire the copyright, and you may not:
- republish, upload, share or distribute the file publicly, or make it available for download;
- resell it, or sell copies, extracts or derivatives of it;
- use the artwork or text commercially, including on print-on-demand platforms, merchandise, or another website or product;
- remove or alter any copyright notice, licence page or watermark;
- claim authorship of the research or the artwork.
Your copy is watermarked with your order details. If a copy is distributed without permission, it can be traced back to the order it came from.
Acceptable use of this website
You may not:
- scrape, crawl, harvest or systematically copy any part of this site, its text, its images or its underlying data, by any automated means, or use it to build or train a dataset or a competing product;
- copy the site’s text, design or structure for another site;
- attempt to gain unauthorized access to any part of the site, its accounts or its servers, or to interfere with its operation;
- use the site for anything unlawful, or to impersonate anyone.
Automated access outside a normal search engine crawl is not permitted. We reserve the right to block access and to pursue any remedy available to us.
Disclaimers
Our books are works of historical research, interpretation and design, supplied for personal interest and enjoyment. To the fullest extent permitted by law, the site and everything we sell are provided “as is”, and we disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.
We do not warrant that the site will be uninterrupted or error-free, or that the historical record we report is complete or free of the disagreements that exist between sources.
Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent permitted by law, neither Fufos LLC nor its officers, members, employees or contractors will be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or loss of goodwill, arising out of or connected with your use of the site or anything you buy from us, even if we were told such damages were possible.
Our total liability to you, for any and all claims, is limited to the amount you actually paid us for the order the claim relates to.
Some states do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation of certain damages. Where that is the case, these limits apply to the maximum extent the law allows, and nothing here limits liability for fraud or for anything that cannot lawfully be limited.
Indemnity
You agree to indemnify Fufos LLC against any claim, loss or expense, including reasonable legal fees, arising from your breach of these terms or your misuse of anything we supplied — in particular any unauthorized reproduction or distribution of a book.
Governing law and how disputes are resolved
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Wyoming, United States, without regard to its conflict of laws rules, and by applicable U.S. federal law.
Talk to us first
If something goes wrong, email support@lineageandheritage.com and give us 60 days to put it right. Most things end here, and it costs you nothing to try.
Arbitration
If we cannot resolve it, you and Fufos LLC agree that any dispute will be settled by binding individual arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, rather than in court. Arbitration is less formal than a lawsuit; an arbitrator can award the same individual relief a court could.
You keep the right to bring an individual claim in small claims court instead, if it qualifies.
No class actions
Claims may only be brought individually, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any class, collective, consolidated or representative proceeding. The arbitrator may not consolidate more than one person’s claims.
You can opt out of arbitration
This is not take-it-or-leave-it. You may reject the arbitration agreement and the class action waiver in this section by emailing support@lineageandheritage.com with the subject line ARBITRATION OPT-OUT within 30 days of your first order, giving your name and order number. Opting out costs you nothing and changes nothing else about your order or our service. If you opt out, disputes go to the state or federal courts located in the State of Wyoming, and you and we both consent to the jurisdiction of those courts.
If you are outside the United States
We sell to the United States. If you nonetheless order from elsewhere, nothing in these terms removes any right that the mandatory consumer law of your country of residence gives you and that cannot be waived by agreement, including any right to bring proceedings before the courts or consumer authority of that country.
Changes to these terms
We may update these terms. The version and date at the top always tell you which set is current. The terms that apply to your order are the ones published when you placed it, and we will not apply a change retroactively to an order already made.
Contact
support@lineageandheritage.com
Fufos LLC, a Wyoming limited liability company, trading as Lineage & Heritage.